


La Hymne et la Tombe

by shabnam_e_maghz



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-29
Updated: 2010-09-29
Packaged: 2017-10-12 07:16:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/122295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shabnam_e_maghz/pseuds/shabnam_e_maghz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five Edith Piaf songs Mal taught Ariadne, and one she didn't have to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La Hymne et la Tombe

**Author's Note:**

> Basically this fic is a shameless, shameless excuse for Edith Piaf love.
> 
> Wait, no, really. It's also because I love Ariadne and wanted to write a fic with her in it, and I wanted Mal to have a chance, in her way, to tell Ariadne her story outside of her identity in Cobb's mind as the mad wife in the attic. And, really, I don't think there can be a better song to summarize and illustrate the best in Mal and the heartbreak of her story than "Hmne a l'Amour."
> 
> NOTE ON THE SONGS: I think I managed to make it so the majority of the story makes sense even if you don't listen to the songs or can't follow the lyrics. However, the last chapter is deffos an exception, so here's a handy link to [the song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOTj0jCtwpA&feature=related), and to [a translation of the lyrics into English](http://www.lyricstime.com/josh-groban-hymne-a-l-amour-english-lyrics.html).

[I.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX1r4nbVZV0)  
"What are you," Ariadne gulped. "What are you doing here?"

"You associate me with Edith Piaf, I suppose," Mal said, quietly. Her eyes were sad, quiet – lonely – and Ariadne couldn't see yet the fury that she was used to. That she knew could reappear at any time.

"Is Edith Piaf playing right now?" asked Ariadne.

"It would seem you imported some of her songs onto your iPod after you started designing dreams."

"It's on shuffle right now, isn't it," said Ariadne, closing her eyes and trying to remember. "I'm on a bus. I fell asleep."

"Are you in love with someone right now?" asked Mal, and Ariadne's eyes narrowed.

"That's awfully out of nowhere," she answered slowly. Then, drawing herself to as much of a full height as she could claim, and wishing she'd had Arthur train her for militarized subconscious after all: "This isn't an extraction, is it? You're not a forger, are you? Because Mal isn't a good person to get me to open up to, you know. Eames? You can't be Eames."

Mal shook her head, and again she seemed, in that instant, lonely and sad and not at all as if she was about to kill all living things in her vicinity.

"I once asked you if you knew what it was to be a lover," she said.

Ariadne nodded. Her mouth was a little dry.

"Do you have a different answer now?"

"No," she said.

"Would you like – if you want to listen to Edith Piaf," Mal began, and her tone made Ariadne quite sure this wasn't an extraction.

It did, however, raise alarm bells of an entirely different nature. Mal's expression did nothing to quell them.

"I, um," she said, panicking. Arthur had warned her, pretty delicately since it was Arthur, but at some point in that unnecessarily long five-minute round-the-bushes discussion she had picked up that every so often things like this would happen with her dreams and it would invariably be, Arthur said, disorienting and very, very embarrassing once one woke up. "I, um. I. Don't think I – I'm pretty sure I don't – I mean, you're my subconscious, so, but, but I thought I was actually pretty sure I didn't – swing that – and, uh. You're Cobb's wife, so, you know, even if you're just a projection you're my projection of Cobb's wife, so, you. You know. It would be." She gulped, and raised her voice. "It would just be very, very, _very_ awkward."

She hoped her subconscious was hearing any of this.

Mal turned her face upwards, as if listening through the clouds. This made quite visible the hollows and lines of her throat, which.

"Dream," hissed Ariadne under her breath, in tones of dire warning, "stop it. I mean it. Stop it now."

Mal stepped back, exhaled. She closed her eyes and looked as if she was clearing her head. " _Comme moi,_ " she said. "That's what's playing. How appropriate. For you, I suppose, you were wondering if I felt the same way you did; for me, I suppose I want to create someone who feels the way I did. You really must be in love with someone."

"I – "

Ariadne bit back the ridiculous urge to say _My only love is dreamshare, okay._

Mal was still listening to Ariadne's iPod, what parts of it were warbling through to the dream state, anyway. So this dream didn't seem anymore like it was destined to end in nightmarishly Freudian sex that would traumatize her for life. Ariadne reminded herself to feel relieved.

"I'm not really a love sage, you know," Mal was saying. "But I will make an exception for Edith Piaf."

"I didn't know my subconscious thinks I need a love sage," Ariadne answered, and then seemed to hear a sudden crash of noise.

" _Comme moi_ ," a tinny voice warbled in her ear. Mal had been right, apparently. " _Comme moi dans l'instant où mon coeur, en suspens, se retient un moment …_ "

"Ugh," said Ariadne, putting a hand over her eyes. So, her subconscious was going hyperconscious, which was normal. It was manifesting as Mal, which, also logical, really.

It was playing matchmaker, which – less so.

She tried not to use the rest of the bus ride to wonder who Mal thought she was in love with.

 

[II.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd-QafcXHI4)  
"It's one of her most sensual songs, actually," Mal said, closing her eyes to listen.

"It doesn't sound at all sensual," said Ariadne.

"Well, then, listen," said Mal.

" _Je ne peux pas dire l'effet que tu me fais_ ," she managed to decipher, through the dreamtime sound warp. "I … can not …"

" 'I can't describe the effect you have on me,'" Mal said, eyes still closed, clearly from memory. " 'But truly, you have a strange effect. It begins here,'" she said, and pointed to her heart, voice speeding up and rising, " 'it passes here, it continues, it goes on to …'"

"Oh this is ridiculous," said Ariadne, "my subconscious is sick. _Sick_."

And, thank God, another side effect of hyperconscious dreaming: she jolted herself out of it.

 

[III.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPGRQdh88Qg)  
The third time, she was actually expecting it somewhat. It was one of the three Edith Piaf songs she'd actually listened through to on her own time – two, if she wanted to be fair and not count "Rien de Rien" – and she closed her eyes humming to it.

So she wasn't surprised to see Mal.

She was surprised they weren't in that hotel room, or in her memory of Cobb's house. They were in her old high school, instead, in the gym, bleachers pulled out as if for a concert.

The song was blaring on the loudspeakers, and an ocean of kids – some she knew, some more generic – were all singing to it.

"This is inoffensive enough," said Ariadne.

"I am not trying to teach you about seduction, you know," said Mal. "I'm trying to teach you about Edith Piaf. It's one of the highest forms of art, after all, catching very complicated truths in such simple forms."

"How does my subconscious know the lyrics?" asked Ariadne, but Mal, her face turned up to the speakers and her voice no longer tolerant, said: "Sing."

" _C'est lamour qui fait qu'on aime_ ," Mal began, and Ariadne, who couldn't pronounce all those apostrophes that fast, closed her eyes and settled for singing in English.

"It's love that has us dream," she sang, as the crowd swayed cheerily back and forth in a way no high school crowd would ever, ever do for ridiculous French chansons; "It's love that wants us to love each other," she sang, and really all they were missing were dimmed lights and cell phones to wave, the way this crowd was believing in the song they were singing; "It's love that has us cry."

 _It's love that makes us dream_ , she realized she had just said, and she stopped singing.

"So my only love legitimately is dreamshare, isn't it," she said. "Or architecture." Jesus. She didn't know whether to be relieved or bemused or horribly disappointed.

Mal gripped her arm, hard, and Ariadne remembered that any projection she would have of Mal would necessarily have the capacity to stab her on sight.

" _Dans l'amour, il faut des larmes_ ," she sang. "In love, we have to give."

" _Et ceux qui n'ont pas de larmes_ ," Edith Piaf carried on, "Those who won't ever cry …"

Edith Piaf's voice, of course, was Mal's, in the dream. Ariadne closed her eyes and, well, it was tuneful, and an entire gymful of people were into it. Really, the cell phone lights might as well already be there, spiritually speaking. This particular dream, not unlike a pep rally, was maybe actually sort of fun.

" _Il faut tant, et tant des larmes_ ," she sang, swaying, " _pour avoir le droit d'aimer_."

You need that many tears to have the right to love –

" _Mon amour, oh toi que j'aime_ ," she began, and realized the gym had gone silent. Mal was singing this line alone, the dream apparently had decided.

"My love, oh, you whom I love," Mal was belting, her voice Edith Piaf's, and that was when Ariadne saw the tears, " _Tu me fais souvent pleurer_ …"

The epiphany of that moment floored Ariadne, and it felt like just a moment later that the dream ended.

" _Tout ça bien egal_ ," she heard. A moment of disorientation and she realized her iPod had moved on to the next song. "Reflexes," she sighed, and wondered if that meant "Rien de rien" served as an infallible alarm clock for everyone else on the team as well.

And then the song continued. " _Non, rien de rien_ ," sang Edith Piaf, and Ariadne, silent, rooted, wasn't able to stop listening.

 

[IV.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKgcKYTStMc)

"You can't start breaking the rules like this already, Ariadne, give it a year at least," said Arthur.

"C'mon, there's no risk to this," she said, setting up the PASIV case.

"I could just tell you, if you want to know."

"If Mal's going to be a regular thing in my dreams, even my regular dreams, it's just as well I see her as something other than a malignant force," said Ariadne, recognizing even as she said it what a flimsy excuse that was.

Arthur sighed. "So what's your brilliant idea for risk-free memory share?"

"I'll design the dream, given a photograph or something that will let me give your subconscious something to trigger it," she said. "In this case, the fact that we both went to the same school, and we both know what the libraries look like. You'll bring your memories into that dream, and so since you won't be doing any of the architecture, you'll be fully conscious of it as a memory. Then you'll wake up as if from a normal dream, like any subject would, and I'll have gotten to see the memory."

"It wouldn't work on a large scale, Ariadne."

"I'm not patenting a new technique, Arthur," she said, winding out the needles. "This is just my devious plan to see you in college sweaters and pajama pants."

"I never," said Arthur, in somber tones, "wore pajama pants."

They went under, and Ariadne wasn't really surprised that, left to its own, iPod-less devices, all her subconscious could come up with was "La Vie en Rose."

She was surprised, more than she expected, at the sight of a young Cobb and Mal and Arthur in front of a blackboard.

"Sweatpants, Arthur?" she said, smiling. "You wore sweatpants to the study rooms in the library? Ahaha, I'll just bet you never wore pajama pants, indeed."

Arthur didn't answer. He was looking at the scene in front of him, stock still, transfixed.

Ariadne bit her lip and turned to look at the college Arthur instead.

He was glowing, almost giggling, and his face had broken out into dimples as he looked at Mal, Mal, who was also younger than Ariadne had ever seen her. Her face was rounder, her eyes bigger, and her hair was straight and lanky, pulled back into a messy ponytail. She was wearing a T-shirt and a scarf around her neck. And there was Cobb, who was virtually unrecognizable. His hair was mousy and brown, crew-cut, glasses on his nose, shoulders skinnier, face unlined. They all had dark circles under their eyes, and they were all a bit rounder around the edges. Mal's eyes had the start of crow's feet, and she laughed with her whole body, head moving, mouth in a wide, uninhibited grin.

"Stop, stop, Dom, this is still work," she laughed, pushing his face out of her neck.

"We're done with work for today, Mal, are you kidding me, God, Mal," and he looked so happy.

"Even I say we're done for today," said Arthur, and Ariadne wondered if Arthur still had dimples like that when he smiled.

"We still have to pick a song, at least." Mal pushed Cobb's face away and stood up, face still laughing. "Come on. It's the biggest day of my life. Let's end it right."

"It's a magic day for all of us," said Arthur. "We figured it out, Mal. _You_ figured it out, and also you inexplicably said yes to this moron. It's your day most of all. You pick."

"It's Cobb's name on this thesis, too," said Mal. "He ought to do _something_ , and as I've done all the groundbreaking deduction, that leaves the song choice to him."

"Our wedding song," Cobb murmured. "Let's make the signal our wedding song. If Arthur doesn't mind."

"I'm married to you both anyway," said Arthur.

" _La Vie en Rose_ it is, then," said Cobb, and Mal snorted.

"What, you don't like chansons?"

"I love chansons," she said. "A wedding song needs to be something we can both relate to."

"Everyone can relate to _La Vie en Rose_ ," said Arthur.

"Everyone can relate to _La Vie en Rose_ ," agreed Mal, "but if the theme song of your love for me is a … a _rhapsodie_ about being in the arms of a man, we need to have a talk."

"You just want to choose the song," Dom said. "Let's pretend I said, 'Whatever your favorite chanson is.'"

"That's the right answer," said Mal. " _Rien de rien_ it is."

And it was an unapologetic song, as fierce and driven and defiant as it was romantic, Ariadne had come to realize over her time with it, over the countless emotional, monstrous lifetimes that had ended with its relentless crescendo, its ram-pam-pam and soft, almost subpresent sweet notes. It was the one Edith Piaf song about sheer self-determination and drive; the love was an undertone, the sweet turn at the end, the soft underside, the secret heart. Mal in real life, Ariadne might already have known, would never have rhapsodized about a performer or about romantic chansons, even if she listened to them. But this she might have loved. This was Mal's song.

They woke up.

Ariadne took her time taking her eyes from the ceiling. It hadn't been traumatically revelatory, which made it almost harder to look at Arthur now. It had been just revelatory enough.

He was keeping his eyes closed, but he spoke as soon as she turned her head to him.

"You have," he said, and his throat worked. "An amazing gift for getting people to open up to you."

His arm did raise up this time, and lay unapologetically across his eyes.

 

[V.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUBfeAocRxw)

It was a period café, which was why it kept playing Charles Trenet and Jacques Brel and some Josephine Baker dances. It was meant to be atmospheric music.

And Ariadne kept getting distracted by it.

"In our hearts is nothing but love, forever," she murmured. And, a few verses went by she couldn't get more than a gist of, but: "If there's no more need to love, then me, I'd prefer to die."

These dreams, if nothing else, were doing wonders for her French.

 

[VI.](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOTj0jCtwpA&feature=related)  
"A dream grave," she heard Arthur say behind her.

"I thought it was the only really sensible sort of grave to set up, everything considered," Ariadne told him, shrugging.

"I would never have conceived of creating it, though. Few people could have designed one."

Ariadne had set the iPod against the actual PASIV saline levels. This was PASIV architecture, technically speaking, but it meant once the song changed the dream would switch so drastically that it would kick them out of it by itself.

It meant that she and Arthur were both free to bring whatever projections they liked into the dream.

She had thought "grave," and so there was a grassy knoll, a black tombstone, flowers. Arthur was wearing a suit and holding a bouquet.

"But why for Mal?" Arthur asked. "You never really …"

Ariadne shook her head. "In my dreams – and in, in other people's dreams – I knew her. You of all people should know I can't so easily dismiss that as not real."

"And you should know that feels a bit arch, spoken to someone who really – someone who lost her."

Ariadne tilted her head up to try and listen through the clouds.

She was silent for a while.

"So far," she said at last, "my only love is architecture. I like to make things, to understand things, to analyze and dig to the structures of things. But it means I'm curious. And I've gotten to see – things that aren't in my life yet. Truths that aren't true for me, not yet. Problems that aren't within my scope of comprehension. Failure and weakness realized for the first time and realizing it's far bigger and more frightening and uncontrollable than I could conceive of it, and it's humbling." If Arthur was hearing in this _I was in love with Dominic Cobb_ , well, he wouldn't be entirely wrong.

"I never did know the real Mal," Ariadne added. "But I still – met her. Saw her. And she, not even the idea of her, she, actually _she_ , taught me about things that I also had never. Things that also I couldn't comprehend, things that still don't mean anything to me, and now I understand how much they mean, anyway. How you can't move and understand, can't, can't presume, so easily." If Arthur heard _I think I would have been hopelessly in love with her_ , he wouldn't have been entirely wrong. "I get, I think, to visit her grave," she said. "Or design one to visit."

Arthur walked forward, and laid down his bouquet at the tombstone.

"Mal," he said, looking at her name on the stone, "was more than – more than you could, in. And more too than oth –" He paused for a breath's length. "She was more," he said at last, simply.

"I know. That I know."

"I can hear it, a little," said Arthur. "Through the clouds. What song is it?"

"I can't sing this one," Ariadne answered him. "Not this one. Not yet."


End file.
